A tale of one city and its shameful secrets: The Victorian City by Judith Flanders

We are beginning to know more about the Victorians than they knew about themselves. Hardly a month seems to pass without another book or television programme investigating their architecture, food, clothes, transport, sewers, cemeteries, morals.

It is a remarkable turnaround from the mid-20th Century, when ‘Victorian’ was an insult and town planners were tearing down any solid civic buildings and terraces the German bombers had missed.

Judith Flanders, having already written books on the Victorian house and Victorian leisure, has now delivered a panoramic study of Victorian London, specifically the fast-expanding city Dickens knew in his lifetime.

TRAFFIC FUMES: The smell of a city in which most of the vehicles were horse-drawn was overwhelming

The age’s greatest novelist was also a brilliant journalist, who conjured up the most enduring picture we have of London’s teeming streets. In 1850s Clerkenwell, Dickens heard the frightened cries of women as a mad bull bolted along St John Street and came to rest in the back parlour of a tripe shop. Nearby, in Smithfield Market, the ground was so churned up with animal dung that policemen wore thigh-high fishermen’s boots.

In the 1840s, 20,000 tons of animal excrement was cleared per year between Piccadilly and Oxford Circus. Social investigator Henry Mayhew reports the ‘sickening stench’ coming from the knackers’ yards where up to 1,000 horses would be slaughtered weekly.

Why not try:

The Streets, by Anthony Quinn, is published by Jonathan Cape and reviewed in New Fiction

It was as nothing to the Great Stink of 1858, when the smell from the Thames riverbed, putrid and fermenting in temperatures of 33C (90F), became overpowering. Parliament itself began to choke and drove through legislation on a city-wide sewer project.

But proper sanitation came too late for those wiped out by cholera and other fevers. The city’s crypts, according to Dickens, smelt of ‘rot and mildew and dead citizens’.

The poor were, naturally, the most vulnerable to disease, and if this book tells us anything about Victorian London it is that poverty was its most shameful secret. Between 1830 and 1850 the city’s population ballooned by one million, putting a strain on transport, food distribution and, most seriously, housing.

Fear and moralistic fervour induced the Government to pass the Poor Laws, which drove the destitute into the workhouse.

Flanders properly devotes a long chapter to slum living, and explains how social ‘improvement’ did anything but; slum clearances simply dispersed the poor to adjacent neighbourhoods, which in turn became slums through overcrowding and inadequate sanitation. An alley off Farringdon Street, circa 1860, had one privy to service 400 occupants.

But this is not a relentless chronicle of misery. Street life had its own wonderments, and one chapter serves up a fabulous account of food-sellers and their wares. Hot eels, oysters, whelks and pease pudding are but a small selection of Victorian street food. The slightly better-off could dine at ‘slap-bangs’, named for their serving-methods and brisk turnover of customers.

Flanders is spirited company on this perambulation through the capital, but it is a crowded market. Her neat trays with their eye-catching titbits of information and tasty morsels of speculation are tempting. But are they fresh? And would you want to stop when you could go straight to Dickens, or to Henry Mayhew’s incomparable London Labour And The London Poor? I think you should. The story of this era, of this city, hasn’t lost its lustre.

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